Dave Grohl: The Path To Nirvana

By

Paul Brannigan

September 25, 2013 11:57 am

Reaching The Top

On 30 September MTV introduced the “Smells Like Teen
Spirit” video as a world premiere on its flagship alternative show
120 Minutes. Two weeks later the video was moved into the
channel’s Buzz Bin slot, intended to showcase new talent: artists
selected for the Buzz Bin could expect to have their video aired between
12 and 30 times a day. With “Teen Spirit” also riding high
on the Billboard Alternative, Modern Rock, and Top 40 charts, it was
becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the Seattle trio.

“It didn’t matter what time of day or night you turned on
MTV, ‘Teen Spirit’ was on,” recalls Nirvana PR Anton
Brookes. “You’d walk down the street and you’d hear it
on the radio. You’d walk into a shop or bar and it would be
blaring out. Everywhere you went it was there. It was
surreal.”

“My band Kyuss was on tour,” recalls Queens Of The Stone
Age/Them Crooked Vultures frontman Josh Homme, “and I remember
seeing the video on MTV at 3A.M. in a hotel room. I was saying,
‘Man, this is so good, everyone should be into this music but
they’re not going to be. It’s not going to get played
because it’s too good.’ About a week later I realized how
wrong I was ...”

“The video was probably the key element in that song becoming a
hit,” says Grohl. “People heard the song on the radio and
they thought, ‘This is great,’ but when kids saw the video
on MTV they thought, ‘This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and
they’re tearing up their high school.’ We were touring and
we’d go back to the hotel and turn on the TV and see our video and
go, ‘That’s so funny, we’re on TV, and we’ve
just played the 9:30 Club!’ or whatever. And then with the video
came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.”

On October 12, 1991 Nevermind entered the Billboard album chart at
#144. That same day Butch Vig drove down to Chicago from Madison to meet
up with the band at their headline show at The Metro, the same venue
Cobain, Novoselic, and Chad Channing had played as a support band on the
eve of their Smart Studio session 18 months previously. The drummer was
astonished to find around 5,000 people waiting in line for the
1,100-capacity club.

“At that point there was a huge buzz in the air,” says
Vig. “People were calling me going, ‘Oh my God, the Nirvana
record is amazing.’ And I knew there was this electricity in the
air, that something was going to happen for them.”

Keeping A Cool Head

On November 2, 1991, as Nirvana headed over to Europe for six weeks
of headline shows, Nevermind broke into the Top 40 of the Billboard 200,
hitting #35. The following week the album moved up to #17. One week
later it was at #9: the next it sat at #4. In the two months since its
release the album had now sold 1.2 million copies in the U.S. alone.

“I was at Geffen when [Guns N’ Roses’ hugely
successful 1987 debut] Appetite For Destruction was released,”
Mark Kates, then the promotions director at Geffen, told Details
magazine, “so I’d seen a phenomenon happen before. And in
this job it’s very helpful to have had that kind of experience, to
be able to read signs and be able to see things that indicate far more
than the specific nature of what they are. Let’s just say you get
an inner feeling that something is going on that not only can you not
control, but also you wouldn’t want to control.”

This inability to control the momentum around Nirvana may have been
exhilarating for the suits at Geffen, but soon enough the three young
men in the eye of the hurricane began to feel like their lives were no
longer their own. Suddenly everyone wanted a piece of Nirvana — an
autograph, an interview, a photograph, a handshake, an endorsement, an
outrageous quote, a punk-rock gesture. And Cobain, Novoselic, and Grohl
were expected to comply with every request, every demand.

The first indications that the pressures engendered by the unexpected
success of Nevermind might be having an effect on the mental health of
the three musicians behind it came during Nirvana’s winter
’91 European tour.

“On that tour I remember the introduction of anxiety into my
life,” says Grohl. “I had this fear of being alone, because
I was so surrounded. I was being pushed and pulled to go do interviews,
and go do TV and go say hello to these people and those people. We had
no idea what it all meant then. I didn’t have my own hotel room, I
was sharing with [tour manager] Alex MacLeod, and when I got back home
it became really hard to go to sleep at night if I was in a room by
myself. I was so used to being surrounded by chaos that silence or
solitude kinda flipped me out.

“But was I comfortable selling 10 million records and buying a
house and finally being able to support myself playing music?
Absolutely. I never had a problem with that. I have never, ever wished
for less.”

Gathering Clouds

On January 11, 1992, Nevermind displaced Michael Jackson’s
Dangerous album from the top of the Billboard 200. Nirvana were now the
nation’s favorite, and most bewildered, new pop stars. That same
weekend the band were in New York City to perform on Saturday Night
Live, America’s highest-rating TV program, and the show on which
Dave Grohl had first stumbled upon the existence of punk rock 12 years
previously. It was a weekend no one in the Nirvana camp would ever
forget.

On the morning of January 11, Danny Goldberg received a phone call at
home from Courtney Love, asking if he could deliver $5,000 in cash to
her at the Omni Hotel in midtown Manhattan, as she and Cobain were of a
mind to do some shopping before the SNL taping. Nirvana’s manager
dropped off the money in $100 bills later that morning. That afternoon
Love and Cobain strolled down to “Alphabet City” on
Manhattan’s scuzzy Lower East Side and scored a quantity of China
White heroin, returned to their hotel suite, and locked the door.

According to Come As You Are [by Michael Azerrad, Main Street Books,
1993], Cobain and Love first did heroin together in Amsterdam during
Nirvana’s winter ’91 European tour. Both had dabbled with
the drug previously — Cobain started using on a casual basis in
Olympia, while Love later claimed to have first shot up at a party at
actor Charlie Sheen’s house — but using together helped the
couple spin their own little cocoon in which to shelter from an
increasingly turbulent outside world.